for a moment to enjoy these things,
ankle-deep in roadside grass, you can seem to hear the healthy pulses
beating and see the wavy line of hills beating with them, as you look at
the sun-warmed world.

It is good sometimes to think where we are in the scheme of things, to
realise that we are under the bell-glass of this balmy air, which shuts
us in, safe from the pitch-dark spaces of infinite cold, through which
the world is sweeping at eighteen miles a second; while we, with all our
little problems to solve and work to do, are riding warm by this
fireside, and the orange-tip butterflies with that curious pertinacity
of flight which is speed without haste are keeping up their incessant,
rippling patrol, to and fro along the length of every sunny lane, above
the ditch-side border of white-blossomed keck!

What has all this to do with stained-glass?

Everything, my boy! Be a human! For you have got to choose your place in
things, and to choose on which side you will work.

A choice which, in these days, more than ever perhaps before, is one
between such things as these and the money-getting which cares so little
for them. I have tried to show you one side by speaking of a little part
of what may be seen and felt on a spring morning, along a ridge of
untouched hills in "pleasant Hertfordshire:"[1] if you want to see the
other side of things ride across to Buntingford, and take the train back
up the Lea Valley. Look at Stratford (and smell it) and imagine it
spreading, as no doubt it will, where its outposts of oil-mill and
factory have already led the way, and think of the valley full up with
slums, from Lea Bridge to Ponders End! For the present writer can
remember--and that not half a lifetime back--Edmonton and Tottenham,
Brondesbury and Upton Park, sweet country villages where quiet people
lived and farmed and gardened amidst the orchards, fields, and hawthorn
lanes.

Here now live, in mile after mile of jerry-building, the "hands" who,
never taught any craft or work worthy of a man, spend their lives in
some little single operation that, as it happens, no machine has yet
been invented to perform; month after month, year after year, painting,
let us say, endless repeats of one pattern to use as they are required for
the borders of pious windows in the churches of this land.

This is the "other side of things," much commended by what is looked on
as "robust common sense"; and with this you have--nothing to do. You